Friday, December 30, 2011

Friday, December 16, 2011

From SunOS thru Solaris and OpenSolaris to illumos

Last week I attended LISA '11 conference and one of the great and fun presentations was Bryan Cantrill's talk titled "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos".
See the video and the slides.

Also, if you are interested in the whole DevOps transformation watch Ben Rockwood's talk - see the video and the slides.

There were more interesting talks - you can find them at http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa11/tech/

Friday, November 11, 2011

Solaris 11 - hostmodel

Solaris 11 Express and now Solaris 11 have a new functionality which was long missing in Solaris. It allows to force an application which binds to a given IP address to only use a default gateway configured on the same subnet (hostmodel set to strong), or to prefer such gateway if exists (src-priority) or the default behavior which is to choose "randomly" (weak). This is very useful if you have an additional interface (10GbE for example) and you want a guarantee that all outgoing packets from all applications which bind to an IP address on that interface go thru that dedicated interface even if there are other default gateways on other interfaces/subnets.

From ipadm(1M) man page:

hostmodel (IPv4), hostmodel (IPv6)
Control send/receive behavior for IP packets on a multi-homed system. The value of hostmodel can be set to strong or weak, corresponding to the equivalent end-system model definitions of RFC 1122. In addition, a third value of src-priority is also supported. In the src-priority hostmodel scenario, a packet will be accepted on any interface, as long as the packet's destination IP address is configured and marked UP on one of the host's interfaces. When transmitting a packet, if multiple routes for the IP destination in the packet are available, the system will prefer routes where the IP source address in the packet is configured on the outgoing interface. If no such route is available, the system will fall back to selecting the “best” route, as with the weak ES case.

Thursday, October 06, 2011

Oracle porting DTrace to Linux?

Apparently Oracle announced they will port DTrace to Linux. See comments from Adam Leventhal (co-creator of DTrace).

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Oracle Corporation on behalf of Dell, Inc

Out of curiosity I checked the Solaris 11 HCL list. One of the recently added entries is for Dell PE C1100 server and what caught my eye was:
Submitter Company: Oracle Corporation on behalf of Dell, Inc.
There are similar entries for other Dell servers and also for IBM servers (for example: HS22, HX5).
Then there are servers submitted directly by HP (for example: DL585 G7, BL680c G7).

This is a good signal that Oracle is behind Solaris on 3rd party x86 servers - good.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Stopping a thread

Solaris 11 Express allows to stop/resume a single thread - really cool!
See man pages for pstop and prun.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

ZFS returns to MacOS?

http://info.tenscomplement.com
"We're not quite there yet — but we have some exciting products in development.  Our version of ZFS for Mac OS X, Z-410 Storage, started external beta testing last week.  Expect more announcements soon."

http://z410.tenscomplement.com
"Our foundational release of ZFS for Mac OS X is targeted at early adopters and those who can't wait to combine the world's most innovative operating system with the world's most advanced file system.
The initial beta evaluation program is in progress (thank you to those participating). We hope to have more product details soon. Those interested in participating in our future test programs can leave their email below."

Read about it also on ZDNet.

Saturday, March 05, 2011

SCSI UNMAP in iZFS

Solaris ZFS got encryption recently and now Illumos ZFS gets SCSI UNMAP support. Are we going to end up with two diverging implementations of ZFS (ZFS proper and iZFS?) in the long term? I guess it is mostly up to Oracle now - it always has been.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Forced Privileges

Solaris 11 has a new feature called Forced Privileges which allows for a specific set of privileges to be assigned when a given program is run. This makes some setuid binaries more safe and they are no longer really setuid in the traditional sense. There is an excellent blog entry by Darren who explains it in a little bit more detail.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

ZFS on Linux - GA Release

Below announcement was posted earlier today on Open Solaris mailing list:
"
Hi All,

Happy New Year !

First of all, a big thanks to you all for the tremendous response to the beta of ZFS port on Linux.It has been a continuous and arduous effort, not only from our team, but also from you all to rigorously test the beta and make the ZFS port on Linux code fit for use on production servers. Finally, after a three month effort on the testing, making changes and fixing bugs, we now come closer to the GA release.

I am glad to announce that KQ is releasing the GA code for ZFS port on Linux on January 14th. It is the confirmed date and everyone here would be glad to know that majority of the bugs reported have been fixed. The code base is on zpool 28, which means, you have access to dedup feature which wasn't available in the beta earlier !

Also, we are hosting a webinar on January 14th with an interactive conversation with our CEO answering your questions. You can find the details of the webinar on www.kqstor.com

Once again, thank you all very much for the support and patience. We have finally made it!

For any questions, feel free to contact me at darshin@kqinfotech.com

Cheers,
Darshin 
" 

Monday, January 03, 2011

Despite anti-Oracle hysteria, firm is an Open Source powerhouse

 "In the end, the key when it comes to deciding who helps and who hurts Open Source, is looking at the big picture, not the vitriol-filled comments, the fireworks and scare tactics of a few competitors who have been trying to destroy Java, OpenOffice.org  - and even Oracle - for years.
"
 Read More